The Will to Battle

I think I really summed it up when I explained: “it reads like assigned reading for an undergrad philosophy course. The really cool one, with the professor everyone adores, but still.”

Palmer has always been clearly been using her work as a vehicle for important cultural conversations, but that was paired with awe-inspiring world-building in Too Like the Lightning and a careful deconstruction of all of the holes in her world in Seven Surrenders. In The Will to Battle, nearly 300 or 350 pages are devoted entirely to dialogue, about half of which is between the narrator and either (a) the reader, (b) Hobbes or (c) other dead people as imagined by the narrator. It's important work about what it means to be a civilization, how to balance improving this world versus dreaming of bigger ones and what we as citizens in a global society owe each other. I think it may also be doing work holding up either end of the quartet in which it's placed (time will tell), but it's not really functional as a stand-alone novel.